Kreske Nickelsen

Kreske Nickelsen is a life-science venture-capital investor with more than 20 years of global investment and advisory experience. She holds an M.Sc./Diplom in Biology from Philipps University Marburg (Germany) and an MBA from INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), pairing scientific domain knowledge with finance training. Early in her career she worked at The Boston Consulting Group before moving into life-science investing.

She spent a significant part of her career at 3i Group plc in London, where she served as an Investment Director, and subsequently was a partner at Aescap, a dedicated life-science venture-capital fund based in Amsterdam. Across these roles she supervised more than 50 transactions ranging from seed-stage venture capital to mezzanine financings, license agreements, IPOs and trade-sale processes, and sat on boards in most European countries as well as the United States.

Around 2015 she became Chief Executive Officer and General Partner of the Joint Polish Investment Fund (JPIF) — the first institutional venture-capital fund operating out of Poland dedicated entirely to life-science investments, which announced a first close of roughly $42 million in March 2015. The contact details in the stub ([hidden] and the Warsaw +48-22 phone line) date from this period. JPIF focused on early- and mid-stage life-science companies with strong ties to Central and Eastern Europe.

More recently she has been a Partner at Kineo Finance in Basel — a corporate-finance and advisory boutique — and has worked with coparion, a roughly €275M German venture fund based in Cologne, as an investment professional/senior advisor. She continues to serve on company boards, including the supervisory board of Dutch microsurgical-robotics company Microsure.

• Invests almost exclusively in life sciences / biotech, medical devices and health technology, backed by her biology background and two decades of sector-specialist investing.
• Backs early- and mid-stage companies (seed through Series A/B), typically with "visible and near-term value-inflection points" and a 3–5 year holding period — language drawn from JPIF's stated strategy.
• Comfortable across the full financing lifecycle: seed VC, later growth and mezzanine rounds, licensing deals, and exits via IPO or trade sale.
• Values hands-on board involvement — she has served on numerous supervisory/company boards across Europe and the US, indicating she takes active governance roles rather than passive positions.
• Brings a cross-border European network (France, UK, Netherlands, Poland, DACH) and is well suited to companies bridging Central/Eastern Europe with Western European capital.